IBM Poughkeepsie's mainframes get boost: 'Design Studio' status

Design thinking integrated into home of z Systems

Ross Mauri, left, general manager of IBM z Systems, speaks during Tuesday's announcement of the Poughkeepsie Design Studio. At right is Phil Gilbert, general manager of IBM Design.(Photo: Cheryl Loughlin/IBM)

Since 2013, IBM Corp. has been taking a new approach to the design of its products.

With the hiring of 1,300 designers from places like Rhode Island School of Design and the Parsons School of Design in New York, IBM has integrated a new and — it would say — a more human approach to product development.

If you take the time to unearth a client's desires and dreams, so the thinking goes, then you can create a defect-free product that not only offers function, but delight.

Now, that philosophy has been formally attached to one of IBM's most established and perhaps its least touchy-feely of products: the mainframe computer.

Tuesday's announcement that IBM Poughkeepsie, home of the z Systems mainframe, would also serve as IBM's 37th Design Studio sent many messages:

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IBM employees work in the newly designed workspace at the IBM site in Poughkeepsie. From left to right: Ann Novelli, software designer; Cheryl Loughlin, software designer; Tom Manner, staff engineer; and Douglas Rohde, staff software engineer.(Photo: Alex H. Wagner/Poughkeepsie Journal)

It announced that the company would initially employ about a dozen designers at Poughkeepsie to work on digital and software interfaces for the mainframes. "Software is incredibly complex and the jobs people are doing these days are incredibly complex," said David Schwartz, a designer based in Austin, Texas, who served on IBM's team from 2013-14. "... So you need a really talented international, interdisciplinary team to make the software that these complex jobs need."

It signaled to clients they now can meet in a secure yet freewheeling environment — the new work space unveiled at Poughkeepsie last year. "We will be actively bringing clients to co-create solutions," said Phil Gilbert, general manager of IBM Design.

And, coming just weeks after the company announced it would include some of Watson's machine learning capabilities in its z Systems, it reaffirmed the future of those mainframes. "I think the reason why the mainframe continues to be such a vital business platform," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, "is because IBM has done a terrific job in reinventing the mainframe and bringing in the latest developing tools, platforms and operating languages."

Design has always been part of IBM's culture.

The marriage of form and function has been reflected in everything from the modern architecture of its corporate offices to the sleekness of the Selectric typewriter.

But since 2013, design-thinking has been more forcefully integrated into IBM's digital product development. The change has been reflected in the roll-out of design "studios" at dozens of sites and the hiring of hundreds of young designers.

Other studios have been established worldwide from Austin, Texas, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Bangalore, India and Shanghai.

Now comes Poughkeepsie.

"It’s where we build our mainframes," Gilbert said. "These are the most important systems in the world."

The introduction of the analytics capabilities, enabled by machine learning, to the z Systems will allow businesses to ask questions of vast amounts of data without having to move the information from one computer to another.

"People don’t think much about the practicalities of that," King, the analyst, said. "But when you are talking about hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes of data, that could take hours or days or even weeks to move from one system to another."

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IBM's Poughkeepsie site gave a tour of its newly designed workspace, incorporating modern design elements to encourage collaboration.
Alex H. Wagner/Poughkeepsie Journal

Moreover, an increasing amount of mainframe capabilities are being pushed out beyond data scientists and administrators. Gilbert said massive amounts of weather data can be analyzed and presented to pilots or to a logistics company seeking to determine routes for its drivers.

Designers will play a key role in developing these and other applications.

"I think one of the most fascinating things that is happening in spades at Poughkeepsie," Gilbert said, "is human-centered design — fast-paced innovation with humanity at the forefront — even in something that may be as seemingly incongruous as a mainframe computer."